Macron Says France Will Be 'Ruthless' Against Anti-Semitism
France will firmly combat anti-Semitism, President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday, pointing to a surge in incidents of hatred against Jews since the attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7 and subsequent fighting in the Gaza Strip.
There have been 1,159 antisemitic acts in France since Oct. 7, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said earlier on Wednesday, more than three times the number of such acts in 2022.
Those acts include spray-painting swastikas or stars of David on walls, but also insults and assault, Darmanin said, amid a global surge in antisemitic acts.
"Anti-Semitism is resurfacing, in words, on the walls," Macron said in a speech. "The Republic does not and will not compromise, and we will be ruthless against those who carry that hatred."
France is home to Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities and conflicts in the Middle East tend to lead to tensions there.
French prosecutors opened a probe last week over a video showing a group of youths' anti-Semitic chants.
Prosecutors are also investigating whether two Moldovans who admitted to daubing Stars of David on the walls of Parisian properties did so at the behest of someone abroad.
Europe 1 radio said last week that an individual in Russia had directed the operation. Le Monde spoke of pro-Russian bots spreading pictures on social media. Police and the interior ministry said they could not comment on this.
In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the Israel-Hamas war is splitting left-wing parties and beyond.
A march against anti-Semitism planned for Sunday by the heads of both houses of parliament has left parties divided on whether to attend, after the far-right National Rally said it would take part.
(Reporting by Ingrid Melander, Blandine Henault, and Jean-Stephane Brosse; additional reporting by Layli Foroudi; writing by Ingrid Melander; editing by Alex Richardson)
Published under: Anti-Semitism , France
Islam is Not a Religion
What is Islam? To answer that question, it’s more important to know what Islam isn’t. Islam is not a religion. It is an authoritarian, political ideology that forcibly imposes itself on all aspects of any society unfortunate enough to be under its yoke. Islam demands complete subjugation by its adherents. Under Islam, there is no democracy, there is no free speech, no freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no minority rights, and there’s no right to love whoever you desire. Islam allows no dissent. It is a complete and total way of life that glorifies oppression, slavery, and death. Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, cultural, and military components. The religious component is the veil that hides the dangers of its all-encompassing ideology.
Islam was founded in the 7th century by the Prophet Mohammed. From its beginnings, Islam never attempted or bothered to convert “non-believers” by friendly persuasion. Instead, Islam converted non-believers by conquest and forcible conversion, or you were slaughtered. By the mid-8th century, Islam had conquered all the lands from the Indus River, in the east, across North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, in the west. During that period of conquest, if subjects didn’t convert to Islam, they were put to the sword. To this day, most of those lands are still under the control of Islam. There are few exceptions: Spain and Portugal, which during the 15th century, managed to free themselves from the scourges of Islam, and Israel.
Modern day Islam is just as oppressive and dangerous as was 8th century Islam. That’s because culturally, Islam still enforces the same tenets they did 1,200 years ago. What are some of those tenets, practices, and ways of life? Islam enforces edicts against homosexuality to the point of executing homosexuals. As for women, of the ten worst countries for women’s rights, seven of them are Muslim. The Quran clearly states that women are subordinate to men, and men may beat their wives (Quran 4:34). With Islam, there’s a fine line between oppressing women and enslaving them. Islam practices female genital mutilation, a barbaric practice (look it up and be disgusted). Other realities for women in Islamic countries include: women must be escorted in public, largely because it’s too dangerous for them to walk alone (rape and assaults are common); women must cover their bodies from head to foot; and very few education opportunities which result in limited employment opportunities.
Today, in the year 2023, Islam practices slavery (here, and here), the actual commodification of other human beings, and the world stands silent. It also engages in jihad, rape, and pedophilia—yes, it’s acceptable to rape children (bacha bāzī). Also, see this clip, from CNN no less:
Today, Islam beheads its enemies (Dec 27, 2019 in Nigeria), burns people alive in cages, amputates the hands of criminals, and engages in “honor” killings of female relatives (Texas 2008). There’s nothing honorable about a father (or a brother) who kills his daughter (or his sister) because he doesn’t agree with her actions. Adulterers (and even some female rape victims) can be stoned to death, and polygamy is allowed. Earlier this year, an Iranian couple was sentenced to ten years in prison for dancing in public. To say that Islam has nothing in common with Western culture is an understatement. Islam vehemently opposes, and wants to destroy, Western society. Proof of every vile, barbaric, and evil practice engaged in by Muslims was rolled up into one event—Hamas’s attack last month on Israel.
For much of America’s history, we didn’t concern ourselves with the evils of Islam. We didn’t worry about it largely because we’re an ocean apart, and Islam’s 12th century society couldn’t much affect or threaten us. Nevertheless, America’s first foreign war was fought in the early 19th century against the Islamic states along the Barbary Coast of North Africa. Also, throughout most of the 20th century, our focus was on the evils in Europe—Nazism and communism. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that most Americans became aware of the dangers of Islam. That was when the Arabs used world oil markets to achieve their political goals. Then, in 1979, Iranians seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Ever since then, the Middle East and Islam have played a central role in America’s foreign policy.
A problem with American foreign policy is that no president, from Nixon all the way through to our current crumbling commander, has properly understood Islam, the best example being Bush’s post-9/11 statement: “Islam is a religion of peace.” That was an idiotic statement, given that 3,000 Americans had just been slaughtered in the name of Islam. The United States’ lack of understanding wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t in the 21st century—but we are. And a 12th century ideology of hatred and death is a huge problem given modern technologies which gives Islamists the ability to wander the globe killing, maiming, and enslaving in the name of their ideology.
You might wonder what I have against Islam, but let me ask this question: Knowing the profoundly immoral nature of tyrants and authoritarian regimes, would you be alright if Nazism or communism ruled over two billion people on the planet? I’m guessing most people would say “NO” to both, because the evils of these ideologies have no place in a civilized society of unalienable rights. Well, the evils of Islam are just as bad—perhaps worse—as the evils of any totalitarian form of rule ever devised by man. Islam doesn’t want peace; it preaches struggle, constant struggle, because it is an ideology that uses religion.
Many people might disregard the dangers of Islam, as we do have Muslims here in America, and we don’t see things like Muslim men buying children, or public beatings by administrators of Sharia “justice.” But, Muslims are a small percentage of our population at this moment. Anywhere Islam is the majority, there is oppression, conflict, and struggle. Think of the wars and conflicts being fought on this planet; then, think of the countries that have large Muslim populations, and you’ll find those two maps overlay one another. From Nigeria in Africa, to Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, and to the jungles of the Philippines, Islamic societies are engaged in armed conflicts to suppress and oppress those populations. And also don’t forget, a small number can be very dangerous: the 9/11 attack was carried out by only 19 Muslims.
In Islamic countries, conflicts, struggles, and oppression have been ongoing for centuries; no end in sight, and it’s important to remember that above all, Islam is an ideology as dangerous and evil as any ideology ever conceived, using religion as a scapegoat.
Image generated by AI.
remember the saudis invasion of america sept 11
Blue State Blues: 50 Years of Excuses for Palestinian Terror Are Enough
We don’t hear much about the Palestinian cause, between wars.
The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said defended Yasser Arafat — who was then still a notorious terrorist, not yet a corrupt kleptocrat — by saying that his sensational violence at least kept the Palestinian cause from disappearing entirely from the world’s consciousness, and kept the Palestinian diaspora unified, even at the moral price of backing terror.
Said wrote that 50 years ago. But it is almost exactly the same argument used by the Hamas leaders who spoke to the New York Times this week, telling the western public that without their attack on Israel — with all its horrific atrocities — that the Palestinian cause would have been forgotten, left behind in the progress of the Abraham Accords and in the excitement of a “normalization” deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
It is worth asking whether the Palestinians could have done something else in those 50 years to advance their cause, beyond killing Israeli civilians. Or whether violence against Israelis is the Palestinian cause, and how it came to be that way.
After all, you never see pro-Palestinian activists doing much to help “Palestine” between wars — and this time, they started marching after the terror attack, not the Israeli response.
It is easier to destroy than to create.
Let’s rewind to the beginning.
Israel is the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people, and has been for many thousands of years. Jews have lived there continuously for millennia, and even during periods of exile and dispersion, they still faced Jerusalem during prayer — as Jews still do today.
The idea of creating a Jewish state emerged in the late 19th century as a response to persecution in Europe, and Jews began moving back.
A generation or so later, in the early 20th century Arabs living in the region began to feel their own national stirrings, and the Palestinian Arabs were no different — though initially, they wanted to be part of a broader Arab empire, not a separate state.
When the British took over from the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, with a Mandate from the League of Nations, they struggled to reconcile promises to both sides.
The dilemma was difficult to solve, but dividing the land seemed the least bad option. This was acceptable to the Jewish side, which simply wanted sovereignty of any kind — especially with the growing danger to Jews in Europe.
But the Arabs — who were only known as “Palestinians” much later — clung to the idea that there could be no Jewish state at all, and not even any Jewish immigration, not even refugees from the Nazis.
The man most responsible for this intransigence was named Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The British sought to appease him by appointing him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He abused that position to foment riots against Jews, most notoriously in the Hebron massacre of 1929. The British tried to keep the Arabs onside in the Second World War by banning Jewish immigration, but al-Husseini sided with Hitler and the Nazis anyway.
There has never really been a reckoning with this history. The Palestinian Arab leadership collaborated with Hitler and made sure, through pressure on the British, that Jews had nowhere to escape.
After the war, the Germans were “de-Nazified” through public acknowledgment of Hitler’s crimes. But that never happened in the Arab world, which still incubated Nazi antisemitism alongside radical Islamic sentiments.
In 1947, the newly-formed United Nations tried to tackle the same problem that had vexed the British, and came up with the same answer: partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
But the Arabs decided to destroy the Jewish state rather than build their own, and declared war. They lost, and the same pattern has repeated itself for decades. The Palestinians have aways rejected statehood in favor of violence.
Up to 2000, it was possible to believe that some Palestinian grievance justified the rejection. But when then-President Bill Clinton offered Arafat nearly all of the West Bank, and shared sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy sites, and possible compensation for Palestinian refugees, Arafat walked away. He then launched a cynical and destructive campaign of terror that Hamas, the Islamist rival of Arafat’s nationalists, continued.
That shattered the Israeli left, which had long supported compromises with the Palestinians, believing that peace was possible. For the last 23 years, Israelis have been looking for a workable alternative to solve the problem — from building a barrier along the West Bank, to unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, to making peace with the other Arab states in the hope that the Palestinians could eventually be persuaded to set war aside.
Yet the Palestinian leadership had other ideas — boosted by Iran, which continued to fund and arm terror groups.
In 2001, at the UN World Conference Against Racism, which was held in Durban, South Africa, global anti-Israel activists seized on the idea of casting Israel as the new “apartheid” state — which, like South Africa, had to be dismantled. It was an idea without merit, but the symbolism appealed to western leftists.
I happened to be at the World Conference Against Racism, which ironically saw a shocking outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred. Anti-Israel activists literally broke up a meeting to discuss antisemitism, which had nothing to do with Israel.
The same impulse persists in the efforts of anti-Israel activists to tear down posters of Israeli hostages: there can be no acknowledgement of Jewish victimhood, which is part of Israel’s reason for being.
But ask these activists what they have actually done to help “Palestine,” and you will find no answers. They have not invested in economic development; they have not donated to Palestinian schools. A few may have donated to Palestinian relief efforts, but none has given thought to building Palestinian institutions.
The one question that unravels them, every time, is: “What kind of Palestinian state do you want?” They don’t know.
They just want to “free Palestine,” and “from the river to the sea,” which the president of Harvard admitted this week was an antisemitic slogan: it envisions the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its Jews.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh recently urged followers to imagine a post-Israel “Palestine.” He wants an Islamic state. The likely outcome: Gaza. a complete wreck, a constant threat to its neighbors.
The world has heard Palestinian excuses for terrorism for 50 years. The difference now is that those same excuses come from Ismail Haniyeh rather than Edward Said — both from comfortable exile.
The only portion of the Palestinian Arab population that has moved beyond this are the Israeli Arab citizens, who are deciding, in the face of Hamas terror, that they would rather be Israeli than Palestinian. Their “free Palestine” is Israel.
There is talk about what to do with a post-Hamas Gaza. The White House wants it run by the Palestinian Authority, which has never worked. My preference would be to pay Gazans to relocate to the West Bank and annex Gaza to Israel, solving the problem of Palestinian geographic contiguity.
What do the Palestinians themselves want? We don’t know. They don’t either. Again, it is easier to destroy than to create. But “no more Israel” is not an acceptable answer.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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